Historically, inequality mainly manifested itself in areas like economics or social status, but death basically treated everyone the same. To be sure, such equality wasn’t absolute: For instance, access to medical care wasn’t evenly distributed; the wealthy fared better in natural disasters than the poor; soldiers and civilians had different rates of survival in war; and so on. But never before had a situation like this presented itself: less than one-ten-thousandth of the population could go into safe hiding, leaving billions on Earth to die.
